Along with Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho is one of the many great cinematic talents that heralded a new wave of film-making from South Korea. He’s perhaps most famous for his brilliant family-centered monster film, The Host, and his previous effort Memories of Murder breathed new life into the police procedural. While doing rounds for his latest film, Mother, Joon-ho chatted with Frosty at Collider about his next project, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film entitled Snow Piercer—an adaptation of the French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige. The project was formerly titled Transperceneige, and is being produced by Chan-wook.

The story takes place in a world covered by ice and snow, and it centers on a train full of travelers struggling coexist while they continue to cling to familiar class structures. As is usually the case with these sorts of stories, it seems to be an exploration of human nature when pushed to the brink. Apparently Joon-ho has wanted to tackle this project since 2005, before he went on to make The Host. He hopes to start filming in 2011. Joon-ho mentioned that he was attracted to the darker aspects of the French graphic novel, but that his film won’t be a direct adaptation.

At first glance, this project reminds me a lot of the setup for Blindness, and I hope it ends up better than Fernando Mereilles’ attempt at this sort of story. Joon-ho is a much more focused filmmaker, and he’s been getting better with every film—which is more than I can say for Mereilles at this point. Blindness relied far too heavily on shock and plumbing the depth of human depravity without really having a point. Luckily, those aren’t mistakes I can see Joon-ho making with his film.